Fingerprint sensing and matching is a reliable and widely used technique for personal identification or verification. In particular, a common approach to fingerprint identification involves scanning a sample fingerprint or an image thereof and storing the image and/or unique characteristics of the fingerprint image. The characteristics of a sample fingerprint may be compared to information for reference fingerprints already in a database to determine proper identification of a person, such as for verification purposes.
A particularly advantageous approach to fingerprint sensing is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,953,441 to Setlak and assigned to the assignee of the present invention, the entire contents of which are herein incorporated by reference. The fingerprint sensor is an integrated circuit sensor that drives the user's finger with an electric field signal and senses the electric field with an array of electric field sensing pixels on the integrated circuit substrate.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,289,114 to Mainguet, which is assigned to the assignee of the present invention and is incorporated in its entirety by reference discloses a fingerprint sensor that includes a finger sensing integrated circuit (IC). The finger sensing IC includes a layer of piezoelectric or pyroelectric material placed between upper and lower electrodes to provide electric signals representative of an image of the ridges and valleys of the fingerprint.
A particularly advantageous approach to multi-biometric fingerprint sensing is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,361,919 to Setlak, which is assigned to the assignee of the present invention and is incorporated in its entirety by reference. The Setlak patent discloses a multi-biometric finger sensor sensing different biometric characteristics of a user's finger that have different matching selectivities.
A fingerprint sensor may be particularly advantageous for verification and/or authentication in an electronic device, and more particularly, a portable device, for example. Such a fingerprint sensor may be carried by the housing of a portable electronic device, for example, and may be sized to sense a fingerprint from a single-finger. For example, the AES3400 sensor from AuthenTec, Inc. of Melbourne, Fla., is widely used in a variety of notebooks, desktops and PC peripherals. Other fingerprint sensors, for example, the AES850, also from AuthenTec, Inc. of Melbourne, Fla., is a sensor used on smartphones.
Where a fingerprint sensor is integrated into an electronic device or host device, for example, as noted above, it may be desirable to determine whether acquired fingerprints were acquired from a live user. Additionally, it may be desirable to determine whether such fingerprints were not tampered with or substituted. Determining tampering or substitution may be increasingly difficult when a fingerprint sensor is integrated in a host device, such as a personal computer or cellphone.